Week Three Considerations -- Historical Knowledge and the Clergy
It is easy to lose sight of the past two weeks when we enter into the world of a Jane Austen novel. I thought the connections made in the presentations today were very helpful and addressed some of the shifts we are making. They are indeed shifts. At times it appears that Austen is reacting strongly against the kinds of narratives and poems we read in Week Two. At other times it appears that she is simply more interested in the pedagogical function of literature than in the various entrances into history and politics that concern Shelley, Stael, and Hemans, or that she is writing for an audience that is "growing up" rather than grown up. Her novels are social comedies (not ha ha comedies but satires of social, economic, cultural, and political preoccupations), and as a result they might seem place limits on the ways in which we might answer the question "What is reading for"? Our range of historical reference is restricted, rather than widened as it is in Corinne and Hemans's poe (and in Frankenstein, though to a lesser extent), and we might seem to be in a detached microcosm, set apart from the more complicated flux of history.
Or we might not. It depends on how we imagine ourselves as readers and how we imagine Austen's readers. Fanny, after all, is a widely read bibliophile. She is surrounded by books, and she has a room of her own in which to read them. This makes her very different from the other characters, and we might want to keep open the possibility that she read and knew as much as Corinne and Hemans want us to read and to know.
All the same, much can be lost over the course of 200 years, and our context is not the context of the novel. For example, in the discussion of the clergy in Chapter 11 (which is also the chapter in which, as Abinash pointed out, the plenitude of the natural world beckons), serious readers would not have immediately associated the clergy with sermons or eating or any of the characteristics that Mary Crawford uses as she satirizes Dr. Grant and those like him. To be sure, there will always be worldly, incompetent, and downright destructively dangerous figures of authority in any religion, and Mary's satire is suited to the times. George Eliot's Scenes from Clerical Life is a more well considered discussion of the role of the clergy at the time, and given the questions about inheritance that Nicol and Cara raised in their excellent presentations, we might say that George Eliot's book might have been produced, in part, by Mary's provocative comments.
But, moving back to those serious readers, the clergy were associated with scholarship as much as anything else for serious readers. Take a look at Hemans's "The Wife of Asdrubal," for example, and think about the long note from Ancient Universal History that begins the poem. Then go to https://archive.org/details/texts
and type in "Ancient Universal History." Ignore the first entry by Grant Showerman (there's enough to do) and look at the other entries. 25 volumes of Universal History, Anicent and Modern by William Fordyce Mavor, vicar and chaplain. That's what some of the clergy did -- they wrote, just like many people in the nineteenth century, and they wrote a lot, an awful lot. And we know that reading is easier than writing, so when you think of Fanny, or Hemans, or Corinne, think of the knowledge that each writer or character is able to share and put into circulation for history, for the imagination, for identity, for ... you fill in the blank.
While it is fashionable to discount writers like Fordyce Mavor and others, or to use them as straw figures for arguments about one thing or another, or, as Mary Crawford does, to ignore their existence, or the possibility of their existence entirely, they existed and they were used, not only by Hemans but by hosts of other writers. Furthermore, they were used, as you see in "The Wife of Asdrubal," as starting points, not as absolute authorities.
Although it is difficult to see or think about when reading about characters in their teens and early twenties, Edmund might have been fit to occupy that role of the clergy as writer. By the end of the novel, I'm interested in whether or not you think he would be suited for that role ... or whether someone else from the novel might also be suited for that role.
I'll leave you with one last thought, perhaps more related to Hemans and Week Four than this week, but worth asking anyway -- what events in the history of the world have most profoundly shaped the way you answer the question "What is Reading For?"Week Three --Historical Knowledge and the Clergy
It is easy to lose sight of the past two weeks when we enter into the world of a Jane Austen novel. I thought the connections made in the presentations today were very helpful and addressed some of the shifts we are making. They are indeed shifts. At times it appears that Austen is reacting strongly against the kinds of narratives and poems we read in Week Two. At other times it appears that she is simply more interested in the pedagogical function of literature than in the various entrances into history and politics that concern Shelley, Stael, and Hemans, or that she is writing for an audience that is "growing up" rather than grown up. Her novels are social comedies (not ha ha comedies but satires of social, economic, cultural, and political preoccupations), and as a result they might seem place limits on the ways in which we might answer the question "What is reading for"? Our range of historical reference is restricted, rather than widened as it is in Corinne and Hemans's poe (and in Frankenstein, though to a lesser extent), and we might seem to be in a detached microcosm, set apart from the more complicated flux of history.
Or we might not. It depends on how we imagine ourselves as readers and how we imagine Austen's readers. Fanny, after all, is a widely read bibliophile. She is surrounded by books, and she has a room of her own in which to read them. This makes her very different from the other characters, and we might want to keep open the possibility that she read and knew as much as Corinne and Hemans want us to read and to know.
All the same, much can be lost over the course of 200 years, and our context is not the context of the novel. For example, in the discussion of the clergy in Chapter 11 (which is also the chapter in which, as Abinash pointed out, the plenitude of the natural world beckons), serious readers would not have immediately associated the clergy with sermons or eating or any of the characteristics that Mary Crawford uses as she satirizes Dr. Grant and those like him. To be sure, there will always be worldly, incompetent, and downright destructively dangerous figures of authority in any religion, and Mary's satire is suited to the times. George Eliot's Scenes from Clerical Life is a more well considered discussion of the role of the clergy at the time, and given the questions about inheritance that Nicol and Cara raised in their excellent presentations, we might say that George Eliot's book might have been produced, in part, by Mary's provocative comments.
But, moving back to those serious readers, the clergy were associated with scholarship as much as anything else for serious readers. Take a look at Hemans's "The Wife of Asdrubal," for example, and think about the long note from Ancient Universal History that begins the poem. Then go to
https://archive.org/details/texts
and type in "Ancient Universal History." Ignore the first entry by Grant Showerman (there's enough to do) and look at the other entries. 25 volumes of Universal History, Anicent and Modern by William Fordyce Mavor, vicar and chaplain. That's what some of the clergy did -- they wrote, just like many people in the nineteenth century, and they wrote a lot, an awful lot. And we know that reading is easier than writing, so when you think of Fanny, or Hemans, or Corinne, think of the knowledge that each writer or character is able to share and put into circulation for history, for the imagination, for identity, for ... you fill in the blank.
While it is fashionable to discount writers like Fordyce Mavor and others, or to use them as straw figures for arguments about one thing or another, or, as Mary Crawford does, to ignore their existence, or the possibility of their existence entirely, they existed and they were used, not only by Hemans but by hosts of other writers. Furthermore, they were used, as you see in "The Wife of Asdrubal," as starting points, not as absolute authorities.
Although it is difficult to see or think about when reading about characters in their teens and early twenties, Edmund might have been fit to occupy that role of the clergy as writer. By the end of the novel, I'm interested in whether or not you think he would be suited for that role ... or whether someone else from the novel might also be suited for that role.
I'll leave you with one last thought, perhaps more related to Hemans and Week Four than this week, but worth asking anyway -- what events in the history of the world have most profoundly shaped the way you answer the question "What is Reading For?"Week Three --Historical Knowledge and the Clergy